articleNature CommunicationsJul 8, 2022GOLD OA

Widespread increasing vegetation sensitivity to soil moisture

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry · European Commission · +3 more institutions

PubMed
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Abstract

Global vegetation and associated ecosystem services critically depend on soil moisture availability which has decreased in many regions during the last three decades. While spatial patterns of vegetation sensitivity to global soil water have been recently investigated, long-term changes in vegetation sensitivity to soil water availability are still unclear. Here we assess global vegetation sensitivity to soil moisture during 1982-2017 by applying explainable machine learning with observation-based leaf area index (LAI) and hydro-climate anomaly data. We show that LAI sensitivity to soil moisture significantly increases in many semi-arid and arid regions. LAI sensitivity trends are associated with multiple…

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